There is probably not a lawmaker alive who will succeed in placing such a specific business as gambling under government control. But this does not mean that people shouldn’t try. This time around it is women from several political parties who have taken up this noble cause. Oksana Bilozir and Iryna Herashchenko, MPs from the NU-NS faction, Olena Kondratiuk from the BYuT, and Kateryna Vashchuk from Lytvyn’s Bloc have publicized their own version of a draft law on gambling.
Under the bill, those who want to entertain gambling-minded people should increase the authorized capital of such an establishment to one million euros and that of a bookmaking office to 200,000 euros. Payment for obtaining a license will be also measured in similar figures. The legislators are proposing to ban “one-armed bandits” in populated areas and move them outside city limits. The bill also suggests time periods for establishing new gambling “reservations”: five years for casinos and three years for slot-machine arcades.
Serhii Tretiakov, president of the Ukrainian Gaming Business Association, is very skeptical about the effectiveness of this law. He thinks it is a declaration of good intentions without any concrete ways to implement them. “In fact, the law prohibits the business of gambling in cities and throws it on the tender mercies of local authorities. This will only result in corruption because the experience of the past few years has shown that a lot of unlawful decisions have been made at this very level. Lobbying will remain intact, it will be clearly decided who may and may not do this. Once again we will end up in cronyism and bribery,” Tretiakov said.
A serious rival to this bill are two others being drafted by the Party of Regions and NU-NS. Rumor has it that these political forces may reach a compromise on the gambling issue. But standing in the way of their likely rapprochement is lobbying by pro-Russian gambling interests. In six months a law will take effect in Russia that will result in the concentration of all gambling businesses in four specially designated regions. Clearly, it will be impossible to place there the arsenal of “one-armed bandits” alone, which has accumulated on the immense territory of Russia. This is why “some things” are already being quietly smuggled into Ukrainian cities and, surprisingly, villages.
In Tretiakov’s opinion, the chief advantage of these two bills is that they clearly spell out all the gambling regulations. But the president of Ukraine’s gaming association said that this is missing from Bilozir’s version. The two bills define who may or may not go in for gambling, where gambling slot- machines may or may not be installed, and how many of them there should be. This law also abolishes dual licensing: at present an entrepreneur has a choice to go to the Ministry of Finance and purchase a license for 150,000 euros or to a local government body that will issue the same license at a much lower cost.
Bilozir and her female colleagues are proposing harsher administrative and criminal liability for lawbreakers. They recommend fines of between 500 and 1,000 non-taxable minimum wages for an unlicensed gambling facility or one that breaks the law. Punishments also include community service and imprisonment for up to three years. Commenting on alternative bills, Tretiakov said, “There are no such draconian approaches in them because their idea is that excessively harsh punishments will only have the opposite effect, whereas introducing automatic and irreversible liability can improve things.”
The adoption of a gambling law is interesting not only because it is an attempt to streamline the sphere of its application. Given a rational approach, more than one billion hryvnias could be returned to the state coffers. This is no exaggeration. Last year local Ukrainian authorities received 700 million hryvnias for issuing gambling trade patents. This is just the legal 30 percent, Tretiakov noted. You can only get a true picture if you triple this figure.
